This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission.

Pink snow is turning red in Colorado. Here on the Great American Desert -- specifically Utah's slickrock portion of it where I live -- hot 'n' dry means dust. When frequent high winds sweep across our increasingly arid landscape, redrock powder is lifted up and carried hundreds of miles eastward until it settles on the broad shoulders of Colorado's majestic mountains, giving the snowpack there a pink hue.

Some call it watermelon snow. Friends who ski into the backcountry of the San Juan and La Plata mountain ranges in western Colorado tell me that the pink-snow phenomenon has lately been giving way to redder hues, so thick and frequent are the dust storms that roll in these days. A cross-section of a typical Colorado snowbank last winter revealed alternating dirt and snow layers that looked like a weird wilderness version of our flag, red and white stripes alternating against the sky's blue field.

The Forecast: Dust Followed by Mud

Here in the lowlands, we, too, are experiencing the drying of the West in new dusty ways. Our landscapes are often covered with what we jokingly refer to as "adobe rain" -- when rain falls through dust, spattering windows or laundry hung out to dry with brown stains. After a dust "event" this past spring, I wandered through the lot of a car dealership in Grand Junction, Colorado, where the only color seemingly available was light tan. All those previously shiny, brightly painted cars had turned drab. I had to squint to read price stickers under opaque windows.

All of this is more than a mere smudge on our postcard-pretty scenery: Colorado's red snow is a warning that the climatological dynamic in the arid West is changing dramatically. Think of it as a harbinger -- and of more than simply a continuing version of the epic drought we've been experiencing these past several years.

The West is as dry as the East is wet, a vast and arid landscape of high plains and deserts broken by abrupt mountain ranges and deep canyons. Unlike eastern and midwestern America, where there are myriad rivers, streams, lakes, and giant underground lakes, or aquifers, to draw on, we depend on snowpack for about 90 percent of our fresh water. The Colorado River, running from its headwaters in the snow-loaded mountains of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, is the principal water source for those states, and downstream for Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and southern California as well.

While being developed into a crucial water resource, the Colorado became the most dammed, piped, legislated, and litigated river in America. Its development spawned a major federal bureaucracy, the Bureau of Reclamation, as well as a hundred state agencies, water districts, and private contractors to keep it plumbed and distributed. Taken altogether, this complex infrastructure of dams, pipelines, and reservoirs proved to be the most expensive and ambitious public works project in the nation's history, but it enabled the Southwest states and southern California to boom and bloom.

The downside is that we are now dangerously close to the limits of what the Colorado River can provide, even in the very best of weather scenarios, and the weather is being neither so friendly nor cooperative these days. If Portland soon becomes as warm as Los Angeles and Seattle as warm as Sacramento, as some forecasters now predict, expect Las Vegas and Phoenix to be more like Death Valley.

If the Colorado River shut down tomorrow, there might be two, at most three, years of stored water in its massive reservoirs to keep Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and dozens of other cities that depend on it alive. That margin for survival gets thinner with each passing year and with each rise in the average temperature. Imagine a day in the not so distant future when the water finally runs out in one of those cities -- a kind of slow-motion Katrina in reverse, a city not flooded but parched, baked, blistered, and abandoned. If the Colorado River system failed to deliver, the impact on the nation's agriculture and economy would be comparable to an asteroid strike.

Too Much Too Soon, Then Too Little Too Late

Hot and dry is bad enough; chaotic weather only adds to our problems. As we practice it today, agriculture depends on cheap energy, a stable climate, and abundant water. Those last two are intimately mixed. Water has to be not just abundant, but predictable and reliable in its flow. And the words "predictable," "reliable," and "water" go together ever less comfortably in our neck of the woods.

Here's the problem. Despite the existence of the Colorado River's famous monster-dams like Hoover in Nevada and Glen Canyon in Utah and the mega-reservoirs -- Lake Mead and Lake Powell -- that gather behind them, we really count on the vast snowfields that store fresh water in our mountains to melt and trickle down to us slowly enough that our water lasts from the first spring runoff until the end of the fall growing season. Dust-covered snowpack, however, absorbs more heat, melts sooner, and often runs down into streams and rivers before our farmers can use it. In addition, as the temperature rises, spring storms that once brought storable snow are now more likely to come to us as rain, which only makes the situation worse.

This shift in the way our water reaches us is crucial in the West. Not only is snowpack shrinking as much as 25 percent in the Cascades of the Northwest and 15 percent in the snowfields of the Rocky Mountains, but it's arriving in the lowlands as much as a month earlier than usual. Farmers can't just tell their crops to adjust to the new pattern. Even California's rich food basket, the Central Valley, fed by one of the most complex and effective irrigation infrastructures in the country, is ultimately dependent on Sierra snowpack and predictable runoff.

We need a new term for what's happening -- perhaps "perturbulence" would describe the new helter-skelter weather pattern. In my Utah backyard, for example, this past May was unusually hot and unusually cold. At one point, we went from freezing to 80 degrees and back again in three short days. Not so long ago, seasonal changes came on here as if controlled by a dimmer switch, the shift from one season to the next being gradual. Now it's more like a toggle switch being abruptly shut on and off.

To add to the confusion, our summer monsoon season arrived six weeks early this year. A surprisingly wet spring seemed like good news amid the bigger picture of drought, but it turned out to mean that farmers had a hard time getting into their muddy fields to plant. Then when spring showers were so quickly followed by summer storms, some crops were actually suppressed, according to local gardeners and farmers.

The West at Your Doorstep?

Our soggy spring and summer, however, masked an epic drought that has touched almost every corner of the nation west of the Mississippi at one time or another over the past decade. Southern Texas right now is blazingly bone-dry. Seattle had a turn with record-breaking temperatures earlier this summer. In New Mexico, the drought has been less dramatic -- more like a steady drumbeat year after year.

A trip to the edge of Lake Powell in the canyon country of southern Utah in June revealed the bigger picture. A ten-story-high "bathtub ring" -- the band of white mineral deposits left behind on the reservoir's walls as the waterline dropped -- stretches the almost 200-mile length of the reservoir.

Recreational boat users, hoping against hope that the reservoir will refill, have regularly been issuing predictions about a return to "normal" levels, but it just hasn't happened. Side canyons, once submerged under 100 feet of water, have now been under the sun long enough to have turned into lush, mature habitats filled with willows and brush, birds and pack rats. A view from a cliff high above the once bustling, now ghostlike Hite Marina on the receding eastern side of Lake Powell shows the futility of chasing the retreating shoreline with cement: the water's edge and a much-extended boat-launching ramp now have 100 acres of dried mud, grass, and fresh shrubs between them.

After decades of frantic urban development and suburban sprawl across the states that draw water from the Colorado, demand has simply outstripped supply and it's only getting worse as the heat builds. Not surprisingly, a debate is building over what to do if there isn't enough water to fill both Lakes Powell and Mead, the principal reservoirs along the Colorado. Should the seven states that depend on the river live with two half-full reservoirs or a single full one, and if only one, which one? River managers have now realized that both massive "lakes" were always giant evaporation ponds in the middle of a desert and only more so as average temperatures climb. There is no sense in having twice as much water surface as necessary, which means twice as much evaporation, too.

Given the stakes, the debate over what to do if there isn't enough water is playing out like the preview to the all-out water war to come when the reality actually hits. Westerners are well aware that, as always, there will be winners and losers. The constituency for Lake Mead will no doubt prevail because of its proximity to Las Vegas and Phoenix, two cities that grew bloated on cheap but, as it has turned out, temporary water from the dammed Colorado. Already desperate to make up for their lost liquid, they will surely muster all their power and influence to keep the water flowing.

Las Vegas is now aiming to tap into an aquifer under the Snake Valley that straddles eastern Nevada and western Utah. Recently, a rancher friend who ekes out a precarious living there mentioned the obvious to me: the dusty surface of that arid high desert is barely held in place by a thin covering of brush, sage, and grass. Drop the water table even a few more inches and it all dies. The dust storms that would be generated by a future parched landscape like that might make it all the way to the Midwest or even farther. After decades in which Easterners ritualistically visited the American West, the West may be traveling east.

Those we pay to look ahead are now jockeying like mad for position in a future water-short West. A new era of ever more pipelines, wells, and dams is being dreamed up by the private contractors and bureaucrats swelling up like so many ticks on the construction and maintenance budgets of the West's heavily subsidized water-delivery infrastructure. It is unlikely, however, that their dreams will be fully realized. The low-hanging fruit -- the river canyons that could easily be dammed -- were picked decades ago and, unlike in the good ol' days when water simply ran towards money, citizens of our western states are now far more aware of the ecological costs of big dams and ever more awake to the unfolding consequences of dependence on unreliable water sources.

Making more water available never led to prudent use. Instead, cheap and easy water led to such foolishness as putting a golf course with expanses of irrigated green in every desert community, not to speak of rice and cotton farming in the Arizona desert.

Rip Your Strip

All of this is now changing. Fast. The airways across the Southwest are loaded these days with public service announcements urging us to conserve our water. "Rip your strip" may be a phrase unknown in much of the country, but everyone here knows exactly what it means: tear out the lawn between your front yard and the street and put in drought-resistant native plants instead.

Everyone is increasingly expected to do their part. In my little town of Torrey, Utah, we voluntarily ration our domestic water on weekends when the tourists are in town, taking long showers and spraying the dust and mud off their tires. Xeriscaping -- landscaping with drought-resistant native plants instead of thirsty grasses and ornamental shrubs -- is now fashionable as well as necessary, even required, in some western towns, a clear sign that at long last we get it. Yes, we live in a desert.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that this sort of thing, useful as it is, will be nearly enough. Our challenge is only marginally to take shorter showers. After all, 80 percent of Utah's water goes into agriculture, mostly to grow alfalfa to feed beef cows raised by ranchers heavily subsidized by federal grants and tax write-offs. They graze their cows almost for free on public lands and have successfully resisted even modest increases in fees to cover the costs of maintaining the allotments they use.

Utah legislators passed a law last session that gives agriculture precedence when there's not enough water to go around. Consider that a clear signal that the agricultural interests in the state don't have any intention of changing their water-profligate ways without a fight.

Sure, everyone agrees that we have to change, but we in the West are fond of focusing blame on personal bad habits that waste water -- and they couldn't be more real -- rather than corporate habits that waste so much more. The fact is that we Westerners have never paid anything like what our water truly costs and we lack disincentives to waste water and incentives to conserve it. Behind all that fuss you hear from us about the damn government and how independent-minded we Westerners are, is a long history of massive dam and pipeline projects financed by the American taxpayer, featuring artificially low prices and not a few crony-run boondoggles. Call it welfare water.

The Ruins in Our Future

A visit this summer to the most famous ruins in the West, the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park and hollowed out palaces at Chaco Culture National Historic Park, proved a striking, if grim, reminder that we weren't the first to pass this way -- or to face possibly civilization-challenging aridity problems. The pre-Colombian Anasazi culture flourished between 900 and 1150 A.D., culminating in a city in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, that until the nineteenth century contained the largest buildings in the Americas, now uncovered from centuries of drifting sands. Mesa Verde with its "skyscraper" cliffside dwellings, also flourished in the twelfth century and was similarly abandoned and forgotten for hundreds of years.

The mysteries of these deserted cities -- their purpose and the reasons they were abandoned -- may never be fully plumbed. This much is undeniable though, as one walks through cobbled plazas and toppled towers, and past sun-blasted walls: cities, dazzling in their day, arose suddenly in the desert, prospered, and then collapsed. Tree-ring data confirm that an epic drought, one lasting at least 50 years, coincided with their demise. Broken and battle-scarred bones unearthed in the charred ruins indicate that warfare followed drought. What the Anasazi experienced -- scarcity, the need to leave homes, and a struggle for whatever remained -- is getting easier to imagine in a water-short West. Only this time at stake will be Las Vegas and Phoenix.

Archaeologists at Chaco recently uncovered a sophisticated cistern system under the city. Anasazi builders, they now believe, learned how to harvest the runoff from the summer rains that poured down and spilled over the sandstone cliffs behind the ruins. Think of these as the Lake Meads and Powells of their time, capturing the torrential monsoon rains just as those reservoirs do the Colorado River's flash floods.

The cistern system provided temporary water security, but eventually it clearly proved inadequate. In the long run, Chaco couldn't be sustained because turbulent, unreliable flows of water are hard to tame. The descendants of those who left it behind settled the mesa-top villages of the Hopis in Arizona and of the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico. They learned to live on a smaller scale, with scant rain, and after many hundreds of years, they (unlike their once living and magnificent cities) remain. There is hope in that. It is no less possible now to understand limits, to practice precaution, and to build resilient communities.

Smoke Season

When it comes to the perturbed weather regime we are now entering, it's not just our agriculture and our sprawling cities that are having trouble adapting. The vitality of whole ecosystems is at stake. Native vegetation suffers, too. When critical moisture arrives before temperatures are warm enough for seeds to germinate, they don't. The native grasses on my land didn't thrive despite our cold, wet spring. Invasive cheat grass, however, blooms early, grows quickly, then dies and dries. It ignites easily and burns hot.

When higher temperatures evaporate the moisture in soils, they become drier in late summer and fall. Plants wither and are vulnerable to insect infestations. The vast expanse of mountains I can see out my window may seem like a classic alpine vista to the tourists who flock here every summer. A closer look, however, reveals expanding patches of gray and brown as beetle infestations kill off entire dried-out mountainsides. More than 2.5 million acres of Rocky Mountain woodlands have been destroyed by bark beetles so far. The once deep-green top of Grand Mesa in western Colorado is becoming a gray, grim dead zone, a ghostly forest waiting for lightning or some careless human to ignite it.

Dead forests, of course, are fuel for the dramatic, massive wildfires you now see so regularly on the TV news. We had quite a few of those wildfires this summer in Utah, but -- what with southern California burning -- they didn't make the evening news anywhere but here. That statement can be made all over the West. Both the frequency and size of fires are on the rise in our region. Early in the summer of 2008, while more than 2,000 separate wildfires raged across his state, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made a point that many Western governors might soon be making. He claimed that California's fire season is now 365 days long. The infernos that licked the edges of the Los Angeles basin this August were at once catastrophic and routine.

Smoke is dust's inevitable twin in a West beset by climate chaos, and the lousy air quality we suffer when fires are raging is part of the new normal. A few years ago we could check the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website to see when winds might shift and bring relief. This summer, like last, there were so many fires and they were so widely distributed that it hardly mattered which way the wind blew: smoke was in our lungs and eyes one way or the other.

All of this adds up to a kind of habitat holocaust for wild species, from the tiniest micro-organisms in the soil to the largest mammals at the top of the food chain like elk and bears. Nobody makes it in a dead zone, whether it's a dust bowl or a desiccated forest.

Changes start at the bottom, as is usually true in ecosystems. When soil dries and the microbial dynamic changes, native plants either die or move uphill towards cooler temperatures and more moisture. The creatures that depend on their seeds, nuts, leaves, shade, and shelter follow the plants -- if they can. Animals normally adapt to slow change, but an avalanche of challenges is another matter. When species begin living at the precarious edge of their ability to tolerate the stress of it all, you have to expect wildlife populations to shift and dwindle. Then invasive species move in and a far different and diminished landscape emerges.

Human populations in the West will also shift and dwindle, with jarring consequences for all of America, if we do not learn quickly that watersheds have limits, especially within arid and unpredictable climates. The land also needs water. And such problems aren't just "Western." Dust storms and smoke won't just stay here.

There are, of course, enlightened and engaged citizens who are doing their best to address the growing challenge of a heated-up, chaotic climate. Conservation groups like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance are working hard to protect critical habitat for stressed species and urging government land management agencies to include global warming in their plans and projections. The Glen Canyon Institute has raised the specter of a diminished Colorado River and is challenging water managers to get innovative and adopt policies that reward water conservation and punish waste. Across the West, people are waking up and learning about their own watersheds -- where their water comes from and where it goes. This, too, is hopeful. Time, unfortunately, is not on their side.

So, come see the beautiful West, our shining mountains, blue skies, and fabled canyons. It's all still here right now. Take pictures. Enjoy. But hurry...

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A major new study, "Impacts of climate change from 2000 to 2050 on wildfire activity and carbonaceous aerosol concentrations in the western United States" finds a staggering increase in "wildfire activity and carbonaceous aerosol concentrations in the western United States" by mid-century under a moderate warming scenario:

We show that increases in temperature cause annual mean area burned in the western United States to increase by 54% by the 2050s relative to the present-day ... with the forests of the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountains experiencing the greatest increases of 78% and 175% respectively. Increased area burned results in near doubling of wildfire carbonaceous aerosol emissions by mid-century.

"This graph shows the percentage increase in area burned by wildfires, from the present-day to the 2050s, as calculated by the model of Spracklen et al. [2009] for the May-October fire season. The model follows a scenario of moderately increasing emissions of greenhouse gas emissions and leads to average global warming of 1.6 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2050. Warmer temperatures can dry out underbrush, leading to more serious conflagrations in the future climate."

And this is just the mid-century prediction for the IPCC's "moderate" A1B scenario (CO2 at 522 ppm in 2050), which predicts "mean July temperatures to increase by 1.8°C from 2000 to 2050." This is not the worst-case emissions path, which we are currently on (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: "Recent observations confirm ... the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised" - 1000 ppm). What would happen by 2100 on our current emissions path, when the mean July temperature increase from 2000 is triple (or more) the 1.8°C that the researchers modeled? Turns out someone did model that a few years ago.

Back in 2004, researchers at the U.S. Forest Services Pacific Wildland Fire Lab looked at past fires in the West to create a statistical model of how future climate change may affect wildfires. Their paper, "Climatic Change, Wildfire, and Conservation," published in Conservation Biology, found that by century's end, states like Montana, New Mexico, Washington, Utah, and Wyoming could see burn areas increase five times.

For completeness sake - and because I remain optimistic that someday the media will routinely make the connection between increased forest fires and global warming - let me note that back in 2006 Science magazine published a major article analyzing whether the recent soaring wildfire trend was due to a change in forest management practices or to climate change. The study, led by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, concluded:

Robust statistical associations between wildfire and hydroclimate in western forests indicate that increased wildfire activity over recent decades reflects sub-regional responses to changes in climate. Historical wildfire observations exhibit an abrupt transition in the mid-1980s from a regime of infrequent large wildfires of short (average of 1 week) duration to one with much more frequent and longer burning (5 weeks) fires. This transition was marked by a shift toward unusually warm springs, longer summer dry seasons, drier vegetation (which provoked more and longer burning large wildfires), and longer fire seasons. Reduced winter precipitation and an early spring snowmelt played a role in this shift.

That 2006 study noted global warming (from human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide) will further accelerate all of these trends during this century. Worse still, the increased wildfires will themselves release huge amounts of carbon dioxide, which will serve as a vicious circle, accelerating the very global warming that is helping to cause more wildfires.

For more on the new study, see here.

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Inferno on Earth: Wildfires spreading as temperatures rise

Many wildland firefighters carry an instrument called a sling psychrometer. It consists of two encased thermometers, and is swung above the head on a short rope -- making the firefighters appear not unlike David readying to slay Goliath. The instrument gives a quick field reading of relative humidity, one of the most important factors in predicting what a wildfire is going to do. Quick drops in relative humidity are a sure signal that the air is getting drier and that a fire is about to turn ugly.

Photo: iStockphoto

Wildland firefighters know weather. They study weather reports and projections. They track fronts moving across the continent. Just like you, they watch The Weather Channel. But firefighters also have to understand the sky. They have to be aware of wind, and to understand wind they have to recognize how different cloud formations indicate coming changes. The last thing a firefighter wants is to be caught on the business end of an unforeseen wind change.

So when wildland firefighters talk about climate change, it's good to listen. They have been paying attention.

Toby Richards, a fire management officer for New Mexico's Gila National Forest, realized that something was changing in climate patterns when he had to check on a fire a few years back that had ignited in mid-winter above 9,000 feet. "We went up to a lookout and watched this fire burning in an area that was normally under six feet of snow," he remembers. "Every once in a while you will get a lightning strike up that high that burns a tree or two in the winter, but this fire grew to a hundred acres."

Richards is not alone in observing changes in western wildfire patterns. Firefighters and fire scientists across the West have been noting for years that the fire season is getting longer, fires are growing larger, and many wildfires are starting to behave in ways that are considered unusual.

About six years ago, climate scientist Anthony Westerling and a group of researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Arizona began to systematically examine the links between increasingly severe fire seasons and climate in the West. Most recently, Westerling and his fellow researchers pored over records from 1,166 large wildfires in the West from 1970 to 2003, tracking when fires ignited, how long they burned, and how much area they covered. They also gathered a wide variety of data from the region over the same time period on stream flow, temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, the timing of spring, and vegetation dryness.

"The trick was figuring out how to put all of the data together for analysis in just the right way," Westerling says. "It looks straightforward after the fact, but it wasn't so simple, and that is why it had not been done before." When they had finished, the group was able to form a broad picture of the primary factors driving western wildfires. Their results were published in Science in August.

According to the team, the West has gotten hotter over the last couple of decades, with average spring and summer temperatures measuring nearly one degree Celsius (~1.8 °F) higher between 1987 and 2003 than during the previous 17 years. Those warmer temperatures melted the snowpack one to four weeks earlier in the spring, leaving western forests drier and primed for fire earlier in the year. Westerling says the earlier snowmelt provides a "tipping point" for wildfire activity. "In years when the snow melt is late in places like the mid-elevation forests of the northern Rockies, it never really dries out, and there are seldom any large wildfires," he says. "Conversely, in the early melt years, the soils and vegetation dry out earlier, and are dry for longer. That is when most of the forest wildfires occur."

The researchers found that a big jump in wildfire activity occurred in the mid-1980s -- almost seven times more forested federal land burned between 1987 and 2003 than in the previous 17 years. Over the entire region, the length of the wildfire season increased by 78 days from 1970 to 2003. The season has grown more intense as well, with fires taking an average of only 7.5 days to control from 1970 to 1986, compared to an average of 37.1 days from 1987 to 2003.

While those trends are dramatic, they are not surprising to wildfire professionals. Tom Zimmerman, director of fire and aviation management for the Southwest division of the U.S. Forest Service, says, "Fire season now doesn't end until it snows. We used to count on season-ending rains in August or September. Now we just hope for season-slowing rains."

Richards agrees, and points to the May 2000 Cerro Grande Fire, a 900-acre controlled burn that escaped and turned into a nearly 48,000-acre monster near Los Alamos, N.M., as an example of a disastrous wildfire occurring outside of the normal season. "Cerro Grande was a springtime controlled burn, ignited at the right time and under the right conditions," he says. "It should have just been a slow-moving ground fire, but it turned into a fast-moving fire that raced through the crowns of trees. It carried on like a fire that was lit in July."

So we know the West is warming up, and those warmer temperatures are triggering earlier, longer, and more intense fire seasons. The question naturally arises: is global warming driving all of this?

To answer that question, we turn to Tom Swetnam, the director of the University of Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research and a coauthor of the Science paper.

For the past two decades, Swetnam has been examining the fire scars nested within tree rings of long-lived species across the West, such as ponderosa pine, juniper, pinyon pine, and sequoia. By precisely dating each fire recorded within the rings, Swetnam has been able to reconstruct periods of increased regional fire activity going back to the 18th century. Using climate data from the same period, he has been able to show the connection between severe wildfire seasons that appear in the historical record and El Niño and La Niña climate patterns. The wet years of El Niño encourage growth in forests and vegetation, while the following dry La Niña periods turn the forests into a tinderbox. Could it be that the present ratcheting up in wildfire activity is just part of that long-term pattern, and not attributable to climate change?

"It is possible. El Niño and La Niña cycles are important," says Swetnam. "However, the size and scale of the fires we have experienced over the last few years are orders of magnitude greater than anything from the past century. We are getting reports from the field of extreme fire behavior. In my scientific judgment, there is a link between human-caused global warming and wildfires, but we do not have the evidence to prove that yet. Within the scope of our study we can say that the West has gotten warmer and that has led to more wildfires regionally. Other research is being done on causation."

Swetnam says that before he worked on this latest research, he was skeptical that climate was driving the latest increase in fire activity. He thought the main drivers were forest conditions -- the large amount of fuels that had built up in western forests after decades of fire suppression and exclusion. In other words, Smokey Bear did his job a little too well. We have just been putting out too many fires.

Into the line of fire.

Photo: resourcescommittee.house.gov

Richards and Zimmerman confirm that decades' worth of downed fuels make for trouble. But like most people in the field, they realize that both climate and management play a role, each varying in importance depending on where you are.

"The fuels management story is very important in certain sub-regions, but the areas most affected by management are not generating the biggest share of the increase in wildfire," Westerling says. "The biggest share of the increase occurred in mid-elevation forests in the northern Rockies where fire activity was least affected by past management. Even in a place like the Southwest, where past management is very important, it is still the case that the area burned in early snowmelt years is more than two and half times as much as the area burned in late snowmelt years."

While the study points to a dark future for forests in the West, the researchers are not so fatalistic. There is still time to do something about it.

"The public and policy-makers need to wake up to the great risks facing our ecosystems and human communities," says Swetnam. "We are all going to have to learn to live with fire and reintroduce it into our ecosystems as prescribed fire or natural fire outside of wilderness."

Some media reports regarding the study have played up the climate versus management argument, but the researchers say that the reception from land managers and firefighters has been mostly positive. In fact, many firefighters and land managers are glad that someone has been able to systematically document an idea and argument that has been floating around the firefighting camp for years.

"On the one hand, there is a feeling of vindication, to see someone document what they have had a gut feeling about already," says Westerling. "On the other hand, there is some apprehension about what comes next. They know they are the ones who are going to be expected to take care of any problems in our public forests, and this is one they can't solve on their own."

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Things That Go Dump in the Night

Illegal dumps sprout up across the American West

Amber waves of grain? Purple mountain majesties? These days in the American West, it's illegal dumps that are proliferating under the spacious skies: heaps of car parts, furniture, appliances, and household trash discarded on public land. The Bureau of Land Management has identified 6,482 illegal dumps since 2000, plus an additional 607 hazmat cleanups. Sprawl seems to be part of the problem, says BLM's Felicia Probert: "There is hardly a city in the West right now that isn't experiencing significant growth. Typically, we haven't had the appropriation, the budget strength, to add rangers as these issues grow in the expanding West." Dealing with a potentially hazardous material, such as an unidentified drum of liquid, can cost up to $10,000. In California, coping with illegal dumping on private and public land costs at least $87 million every year. Commercial illegal dumping in the state can bring a fine of up to $3,000 for a first offense -- but dumpers generally must be caught in the act to be proved guilty.

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Aspens are dying mysteriously in the Western U.S.

Aspens, the most widely distributed trees in North America, are rapidly dying in some Western states -- and no one knows why. The culprit may be insects, or climatic stress, or overgrazing. Or all of those. Or none of them. It may be a lack of recent avalanches and fires, because aspens thrive in the aftermath of disaster. Or the aspen die-off may have been triggered by a recurrent drought that started in 1996. "There's no real pattern," says U.S. Forest Service researcher Wayne Shepperd. Younger groves of aspen seem to be healthier than mature groves, but it remains to be seen whether they will sprout. "Quite honestly, we just don't have any answers," says Shepperd. Whatever the cause, USFS aspen ecologist Dale Bartos predicts that 10 percent of aspens in the West could die within several years if the trend continues -- and some of his colleagues think that may be a conservative estimate.

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Climate change threatens national parks in the western U.S.

Glacier National Park without glaciers? If global warming keeps on keepin' on, 12 of the most famous U.S. national parks are at serious risk, says a report released yesterday by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization. Temperatures in the Western U.S. have risen twice as fast over the past five decades as temps in the rest of the country. Beetles that would normally be killed by cold weather are chowing down on trees that sustain Yellowstone's grizzly bears. Drought and wildfires endanger wildlife and recreational activities. Within decades, mountaintops in some national parks could be snow-free in summer. The report calls for the Bush administration to put specific limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. Risks to humans, oceans, and fuzzy-wuzzy baby polar bears haven't swayed the Bushies so far, but hey, maybe parks will be the tipping point.

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Three plead guilty to eco-motivated arson in the West

Three people pleaded guilty yesterday to being part of a group that set fire to ranger stations, wild-horse corrals, a ski resort, and lumber mill offices in the Western U.S. in recent years. The 16 attacks harmed no people, but caused more than $20 million in damage. "This is a substantial step in resolution of this case and successful prosecution of the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front in these crimes," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Peifer. ELF and ALF had claimed responsibility for the attacks. The defendants admitted to being part of the two groups, but were not personally involved in all of the fires. Under a plea agreement, the three will likely get shorter jail sentences than if they'd gone to trial, and they will cooperate in the investigation of 10 others who will go on trial in October for a series of firebombings in the Northwest from 1996 to 2001. The Justice Department expects more defendants to plead guilty today.

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Climate change making wildfires worse, study finds

Wildfires in the Western U.S. are increasing in frequency and size, and our drier, hotter climate seems to be to blame, says a new study published in Science. Researchers analyzed 1,166 large fires in the West and found that wildfire frequency increased "suddenly and dramatically" in the mid-1980s. Comparing data from 1970 to 1986 with data from 1987 to 2003, researchers found that the average temperature rose 1.5 degrees in the West in the second time period -- corresponding with a 78-day lengthening of fire season and four times as many large wildfires, which burned 6.5 times as much land and lasted on average 37 days, up from 7.8 days during the earlier time period. Reduced winter rains and early snowmelt caused by warming played a big part. "I see this as one of the first big indicators of climate-change impacts in the continental United States," said study co-author Thomas Swetnam. Hey, maybe now we'll do something about it! Ha. Ha. Oy.

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Summer in Western U.S. is off to a hot, dry, fiery start

In Western states, wildfires and heat waves are getting an early start this year -- a pattern unsurprising to climate scientists, and likely to get worse. Wildfires have already burned more than 3 million acres, more than triple the average for this time of year. Meanwhile, a recent Denver heat wave was the earliest of the year since recordkeeping began in 1872; the federal Climate Prediction Center predicts above-average temperatures for Colorado through September. According to a 2004 study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the number of heat waves per summer could double by the end of the century. "It appears that global warming is an issue that is not going to subside or go away anytime soon. What we thought was the anomaly will soon become the rule," says Mat Fratus of the San Bernardino City Fire Department. Dude, we could have told you that.

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Western governors resolve to combat climate change

Western states need to reduce greenhouse gases while meeting growing energy demand, says a resolution passed unanimously yesterday by members of the self-explanatorily named Western Governors Association. However, the pact neglects to prescribe specific actions. "My friends," California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) chided the group, "it's long past the time when it's OK to just talk about these problems." New Idaho Gov. James Risch (R) voted for the resolution despite being "not strongly convinced either way" whether humans cause climate change, but Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano (D) insisted that human causation is implicit in the language. Schwarzenegger stressed that the resolution was merely an attempt by states to "make an impact," not a rebuke to the Bush administration's inaction. "This is not us vs. the federal government," said the newly wussy Governator. Companion resolutions emphasized energy independence and outlined strategies for clean energy production.

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Bill to sell federal land in Utah could set off cascade of land sales

In the American West, many of the fastest-growing regions contain the most federally owned land, which limits expansion. This puts developers, local officials, and the vacation-home set in conflict with the public interest, and ... well, we hardly need to finish that sentence, right? Some members of Congress from Western states are getting the itch to sell off public land to make more room for development, and a new bill proposed by a senator and rep from Utah is widely seen as a test of their ability to get away with it. The Utahans want to sell off up to 40 square miles of federally owned land in Washington County -- which is 87 percent federally owned -- and use the proceeds to finance local development (instead of putting the money in the federal treasury). The plan would designate 219,000 acres of wilderness too, but most of that land is already protected; it would also create a threatened tortoise preserve and, um, put a highway through it. The fate of the bill will be watched closely by nearly a dozen other rural Western counties in similar situations.

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BLM accused of not preserving cultural sites

Hundreds of millions of acres of public lands are going unprotected, with their historical artifacts undocumented, as the Bush administration focuses Bureau of Land Management funds and staffing resources on energy development in the West, according to a new report from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Under a federal mandate to speed up processing of drilling applications, the BLM lacks resources to deal with threats like off-road vehicles. A single law-enforcement ranger patrols Colorado's 164,000-acre Canyon of the Ancients National Monument, which contains more than 6,000 artifacts. Only some 6 percent of the 262 million BLM-controlled acres have been surveyed for historical and cultural value. BLM "has let their missions get out of whack," says National Trust President Richard Moe. "The extraction part, serving the energy industry, is hugely out of balance with the preservation business." The BLM maintains that just because funds are allocated a certain way doesn't mean priorities have changed. Um.

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Hunters, anglers fight Bushies' efforts to sell or drill on public lands

Bush administration plans to sell off big chunks of public land and open other parcels to drilling are meeting stiff opposition from a traditionally Republican constituency: the hook-and-bullet crowd. Hunters and anglers anxious to protect fish and game are being wooed by environmental groups, which don't have much sway with the current administration. Sportsfolk have been effective in some efforts to stave off development in the West, from winning a deferment of oil and gas leasing in Wyoming to convincing House sponsors of a controversial mining law to withdraw it. While enviros and sportsfolk have a history of cultural antagonism, they have much in common when it comes to preserving natural habitats. "When you lose habitat, [the animals are] gone forever," says Gordon Johnston, an avid hunter and self-described "hard-core, hard-ass Republican." Despite lingering wariness, the head of the Sierra Club's outreach to sportshumans says, "I am seeing trust slowly being built."

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EPA seeks to rescind clean-air protections for rural areas

A new Bush administration proposal would strip significant clean-air protections from rural areas. The U.S. EPA would exempt these areas from meeting federal standards for coarse particulate matter -- essentially, windblown clouds of dust -- and end federal monitoring of particulate levels in those locales. The weakened regulations would have a particularly harsh impact on Western states, where conditions are drier, making blowing dust a greater concern. The EPA claims it's following the recommendations of its own scientific advisory commission, but some members of that group advised the agency to continue regulating dust in rural areas, and all of them said the feds should continue to monitor particulate levels. The mining industry has predictably praised the administration's proposal, but air-quality officials are condemning it as an unprecedented bad move. After a public comment period, the rules would become final later this year.

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It is difficult to recognize change while living through it. However, two recent decisions involving the use of the public's lands signal a historic political and policy transition, particularly here in the Rocky Mountain West. The first of those two is the almost unanimous rejection by Western governors of the Bush administration's multiyear attempt to punch roads into the last remaining wild lands here in the Rockies. The second is the public's outrage at the year-end congressional attempt to sell massive amounts of our commonly held land.

Not in our back yard.

Photo: iStockphoto.

The ham-handed effort to open up the West's wild places to road building was a mistake fostered by the Bush administration's belief, or hope, that most Westerners want our wild lands developed. That myth, as with most Western fictions, was long ago created and paid for by those who live outside the Rocky Mountain West, and is being exposed by our Western governors -- who, challenged by Bush to encourage roading in our remaining slivers of wild places, are instead reflecting the will of the significant majority and informing the Bush administration that Westerners want these lands left alone.

That second matter, involving Congress' midnight attempt to sell the public's land, was also bucked off. The outcry of opposition to that proposal -- led by Western hunters, fishers, and conservationists -- forced its congressional riders, all Republicans, to dismount, turn tail, and head for the fences.

Those two dramatic rejections signal the beginning of the end for those Western, hard right-wing populists who for two decades have been demanding the development, privatization, or turnover to them of the public's land. The national media named them Sagebrush Rebels, and although that implies homegrown, grassroots, local-control advocates, this minority of Westerners was created and financed by industries and ideologues determined to get their hands on the public's resources. For a time here in the Rockies, these self-proclaimed super-patriots became a genuine political force. Adopting fashionable signatures such as "multiple use" and "private property," they paraded their big-buckled hubris across front pages and lead stories as if they spoke for a majority of Rocky Mountain Westerners.

I recall the former superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, Bob Barbee, telling me about his experience with some of these people back in 1991. He has since written, "I went to a meeting in Bozeman, Mont., and there were 700 people there. You can't imagine the virulence of the outcry. I was Saddam Hussein, a communist, everything else you could think of. One lady got up, jaw quivering, used her time to say the Pledge of Allegiance, then looked at me and called me a Nazi."

My career in the U.S. Congress overlapped Barbee's years at Yellowstone, and I vividly remember trying to reason with that same hostility, not only in Bozeman but also in Dillon, Hamilton, Kalispell, and Cooke City, Mont. I understood that most of those people were well-meaning, but they harbored a misdirected anger aimed at nonexistent enemies. They were victimized by the politics of resentment -- a cancer spread by those who saw advantage in the economic and cultural displacements here in the West, exploited the discontent, and made their careers by promoting outrage against all government as well as against virtually every effort to preserve our valuable wild places.

With the overwhelming public objection to these latest White House and congressional schemes to road and sell the public's land, the West has reached a political watershed. It is ironic that in this winter season of short days and long nights we would find the warmth of the West's renewal: our political spring, belief in ourselves, trust in our neighbors, the promise of a happy new year, and our unfettered wild lands.

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Phil Brick.

What work do you do?

I am professor of politics and codirector of environmental studies at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. I am also the founder and director of an environmental-studies field program, Whitman College Semester in the West, a three-month field tour focusing on the political, ecological, and human dimensions of environmental issues in the American West.

What do you really do, on a day-to-day basis?

I teach environmental politics. For me, this has meant introducing students to the depth and complexity of environmental problems. Students have grown up with The Lorax story as a good-vs.-evil model of environmental conflict. The Lorax confronted corporate evildoers and was right in the end, but he didn't save the forest. And meanwhile, he was an insufferable, self-righteous little twerp. Environmental problems don't have solutions per se. They do, however, continually require us to reevaluate how we live our lives, and how we act in concert with others to define and achieve common objectives.

Many people seem to think that the academy is not the place where environmental education -- conceived as activism -- should take place. Nonsense. If you believe this, your understanding of education is pathetically narrow. Education is not about indoctrination or simply imparting information. It is instead about critical thinking and opening the mind to new possibilities. Education should be a form of activism: good teachers, by definition, inspire their students to reimagine their lives and to act on these images.

A typical classroom during a semester in the West.

Photo: Whitman College/Kalin Schmoldt

What happens in Semester in the West?

Students get the chance to live and study outside for three full months. Our travel route covers every western state, and we meet with a wide variety of activists and individuals who are working on natural-resource issues. I try to get students to meet people they probably disagree with, and to meet people whose commitment to the environment might surprise them. We also spend much of our time in intensive courses in writing and ecology.

What long and winding road led you to your current position?

I have been lucky -- I recognized early that my calling was in education, and this has dovetailed quite nicely with my other passion: the outdoors. I did a bunch of guiding for an outfit called California Adventures while in graduate school, and after I got my current job at Whitman, I really missed the opportunity to share outdoor experiences with others. So I started taking students on field trips to take a firsthand look at environmental issues in our region. Eventually, this led me to create Semester in the West, which brings my intellectual interests together with my passion for the outdoors.

Where were you born? Where do you live now?

I was born in Duluth, Minn. I now live in Walla Walla, Wash. The name means "many waters," but it's a desert here. That's why I love the West and Westerners. We're down with the irony thing out here, let me tell ya.

What has been the worst moment in your professional life to date?

Last fall our Semester in the West group spent two wonderful weeks with Western writer Ellen Meloy. The focus of our work was to develop what Ellen called a "deep map of place," incorporating that map into our thinking, writing, and ourselves. Just as we were finishing our time with her, Ellen died suddenly. It was like a punch in the gut, and it hit our group hard.

What's been the best?

The day the first Semester in the West group hit the road in August 2002.

What environmental offense has infuriated you the most?

Lawns.

Who is your environmental hero?

Every year I take my students to visit Bob Jackson and Leo Goebel. They are tree farmers in Wallowa County, Ore. It's one thing to talk about sustainability and the importance of a land ethic. These guys walk the talk.

Who is your environmental nightmare?

Hard-core property-rights advocates.

What's your environmental vice?

I ride a BMW motorcycle. Ever since I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I have wanted one. It gets better mileage than any eco-groovy Prius, and it is a helluva lot more fun. But you wouldn't believe the ugly looks I get from my enviro friends. Motorcycles, apparently, violate the very essence of ecological identities.

What are you reading these days?

Doug Peacock, Walking It Off: A Veteran's Chronicle of War and Wilderness. Meet the real George Washington Hayduke. He's much more interesting than his caricature in The Monkey Wrench Gang. Also, I've just picked up Ellen Meloy's final book, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild.

What's your favorite meal?

I like to eat Republicans. True, they pretty much taste like shit, especially when taken from the social conservative feedlot. But I figure if everyone ate just a little bit each day, the world would quickly become a better place. Although I don't do it myself, I respect those who believe that if you eat meat, you should be willing to go out and harvest it yourself. Hey, think globally, hunt locally, right? But when you live in a blue state, this doesn't quite work. So even when you factor in the economic and environmental costs of long-distance food transportation, I still think it is better to eat Republicans harvested from red states.

What's one thing the environmental movement is doing particularly well?

Ubiquity. There is a lot of nonsense talk these days about the death of environmentalism. Every day, I work with students and people throughout the West whose lives are inspired and animated by environmental ideas. Environmentalists invest a lot of anxiety in what I call a "ledger" approach to environmental politics. Wins are only temporary, but losses are permanent. What we miss in all this are the more subtle ways that environmental ideas are changing lives, knowledge, industrial practices, institutions, and ultimately, landscapes.

What's one thing the environmental movement is doing badly?

The environmental community has been slow to adapt to the fact that the "political ecosystem" in this country is much more conservative than it was in the 1970s. The environment should not be a partisan issue, but we have let it become so.

Who was your favorite musical artist when you were 18? How about now?

John Prine, then and now. If you hate George Bush as much as I do, check out JP's latest release, Fair and Square, especially track five, "Some Humans Ain't Human."

What's your favorite movie?

Dr. Strangelove.

What are you happy about right now?

My beautiful daughter Jackie Xinlan. We adopted her from China a couple years ago, and she's now about three and a half years old. She is, of course, above average in every way.

If you could have every InterActivist reader do one thing, what would it be?

Find something to do outside that helps you live fully in the moment. You can find it while surfing a wave in a kayak, perfectly still for a split second while 10,000 cubic feet per second of river roars past. Or it might be that moment of flight between telemark turns on a steep and deep powder day. Or the perfect rhythm and hum of crank and wheels on a long-distance bicycle ride. It's a big, beautiful world out there, so why are you staring at your computer?

Phil Brick, director of
Whitman College
Semester in the West.

How do you talk about human living environments and their interaction with the "wilderness" in your semester?    -- Kristen Wilson, Oaxaca, Mexico

A major focus of Semester in the West is to acquaint students with people who work with nature every day. Most of our students come from urban backgrounds, so I think it is important to learn from farmers, foresters, Native Americans, and others who have a wealth of experience living and working in place. After these encounters, I hope students come to see nature differently. Nature isn't just something that is pristine and "out there," (wilderness). Rather, we can better conceptualize nature on a wider continuum of landscapes that are inhabited, uninhabited, and perhaps, reinhabited in Gary Snyder's sense of the word. I encourage you to check out a new book by Dan Dagget, Gardeners of Eden: Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature.

Semester in the West requires a lot of travel and your website says this is accomplished in Chevy Suburban SUVs, which are highly inefficient gas-guzzlers. How do you and your students address this issue?    -- Name not provided

When planning the program, I thought about this quite a bit. I ended up choosing the Suburbans because they offer the best combination of safety, efficiency (calculated in terms of mpg/person with eight passengers), and flexibility. As to the issue of gas consumption, we discuss the following question: On Earth Day 1970, the focus of environmental rhetoric and concern was on production -- the pollution and destruction of our common environment by industrial producers. After Earth Day 1990, the focus of much environmental rhetoric (and self-flagellation in the movement) has shifted to consumption. Why?

As a developing environmental educator with very progressive, "left" leanings, I always struggle with finding and presenting the "other side's" perspective on environmental issues. There is very seldom a black-and-white correct answer or perspective, but withholding value judgments is difficult for me. How do you allow your students to encounter multiple sides of these issues while not having them (or you) quickly vilify and shoot down the non-environmentalist views?    -- Robby Schreiber, St. Paul, Minn.

Quite frankly, this hasn't really been a problem. If we are not open-minded, there is little point in having conversations with others. We should not be afraid to ask each other difficult questions. No matter what the circumstances, I insist that our conversations be conducted in a spirit of genuine curiosity and respect.

How do you see the future water shortages playing out? And please, don't throw in the global-warming trump card.    -- Jared Webb, Rocky Mount, Va.

Water in the West tends to flow uphill toward money, climate change or not.

Do you recruit students for Semester in the West who are environmentally inept, to educate them, or do you travel with students who are planning to have careers involving the environment? What is your main goal for these students (e.g., to recycle more, to become one with nature, or to gain more respect for the earth)?    -- Morgan Poncelet, Fremont, Calif.

Some of the students on Semester in the West will go on to environmental careers. Others, I hope, will be different kinds of environmental citizens as a result of participating in the program. My environmental pedagogy is a bit postmodern: I want students to literally disassemble key assumptions they have about the environment and how one can think and act on behalf of it. Then it is time to pick up the pieces. What gets picked up, and what remains on the ground, is up to each student. Some students leave the program with new ideas and new commitments. Others don't move far beyond their original ideas. In both cases, I think, we have more reflective environmental citizens.

Do you think more density in our urban areas will result in more or less active enjoyment of our wilderness areas? And, assuming there is more opportunity for open-space uses, will this encourage users to be active stewards?    -- Maryann Kirkby, Bainbridge Island, Wash.

Check out Lowell Monke's essay, Charlotte's Webpage, recently published in Orion. More and more children are growing up with little or no contact with nature. Instead, the world is brought to them through their computer screens. So I think we can expect fewer and fewer people to be visiting natural areas. For those who do visit, I see little reason to worry that future generations will be any less inspired by nature than we have been.

How exactly does a motorcycle "violate the very essence of ecological identities"?    -- Jon Current, Hillsboro, Ore.

Most of this can probably be traced to a dislike for motorcycle culture in the United States, which is all about machismo, noise, power, and speed. And with Harley riders, you can add a hyper-marketed mix of nostalgia and nationalism.

It's not like this everywhere. In Asia, everyone gets to ride on the scooter in one way or another: grandmothers, kids, dogs, chickens, you name it. They've got the right idea. Ride on!

In terms of place, what role does "the West" play in the experience offered in your program?    -- Name not provided

What makes the West distinct from other regions of the country is the prevalence of public lands. Much of our focus on the program is exploring what these lands mean, and how they might inspire us to act on their behalf in a wide variety of ways, from politics to literature.

Why are environmental groups silent on the issues of overpopulation and consumption?    -- Rena Petrescu, Freedom, Calif.

I don't think the environmental community has been silent on issues of consumption. In fact, we have been obsessed with such issues. From sustainable building and architecture to the slow-food movement, you will find green activists chipping away at the big machine.

What impact, if any, do your studies have on red states such as Montana?    -- Jerry Broadbent, Bucoda, Wash.

Semester in the West might easily be called "Semester in the Red States." Since most of my students come from blue states, I suppose the program is not unlike study abroad programs that emphasize cross-cultural communication. What we learn, of course, is that there is a lot of interesting political and cultural terrain that is obscured by the red-blue dichotomy.

You mentioned that environmentalism shouldn't be partisan, and I agree. What do you think needs to be done to make environmental protection nonpartisan, so we don't lose ground every time a Democrat loses an election?    -- Lisa Mayo, Germantown, Md.

For big-picture thinking, the Apollo Alliance is an example of how environmental issues might be restructured to encompass new constituencies and to redirect the focus of public and private investment. Closer to home, I think collaborative restoration projects are great opportunities to build trust and to build new political coalitions. Such projects (streams, grasslands, forests) help put the environmental community on more favorable strategic ground: instead of being the ones always trying to stop something bad from happening, we can participate, often with traditional adversaries, in making something good happen on the ground.

Colorado Sen. Wayne Allard has one of the worst environmental records in the U.S. Senate. What would be the most effective way to replace him when he comes up for reelection in 2008?    -- Jesse Kumin, Boulder, Colo.

There is a new website in Colorado that aims to bring progressively minded activists together. Check out Progress Now Action and get hooked up.

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Following a year's worth of unsuccessful negotiations between governors of seven parched Western states, Interior Secretary Gale Norton stepped in yesterday to make a decision on how to divvy up the much-coveted water of the Colorado River. A winter of heavy precipitation and subsequent spring thaws have made the debate over how much water to divert to the river's two largest reservoirs -- Lake Powell to the north and Lake Mead to the south -- even more heated. Upper-basin states Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico argued that water levels were finally high enough to decrease water flow out of Lake Powell, which is only one-third full after years of drought. But Arizona, Nevada, and California countered that such reductions would decrease their ability to draw water and power downstream. Norton's final decision? Leave things as is, a situation that benefits downstream states. To which Arizona, Nevada, and California replied: "Face!"

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Hydraulic fracturing raises concerns over water in Western U.S.

Despite persistent concerns about its effects on groundwater, the practice of hydraulic fracturing (or "fracing") appears likely to receive an exemption from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act in legislation under consideration by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Fracing involves pumping highly pressurized fluids deep underground, forcing oil and natural gas to rise to the surface, where it can be slurped up and sold by companies like Halliburton, for which it generates about $1.5 billion a year. A recent EPA review judged the practice safe, but a whistleblower, 32-year agency veteran Weston Wilson, said the review did not use established procedures and relied on a panel composed largely of energy-industry personnel. Democrats tried to attach amendments to the legislation -- one would require a real scientific investigation of the practice -- but they were defeated on party-line votes. After all, as Halliburton argued in a legal brief, regulation "could have significant adverse effects on its business." Can't have that.

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New strategies aim to limit drilling impact in Western U.S.

As pressure mounts from greens and the hook-and-bullet crowd to slow the pace of energy development in the American West, some companies are moving to support conservation research and employ strategies to lessen their impact. One such method, called "directional drilling," involves the use of high-tech equipment to operate up to 32 wells from one entry point above ground. Another being tested is "adaptive management," whereby regulatory and industry officials alter plans if drilling activities have harmful impacts on wildlife and habitat areas. Along with a proliferation of new drilling permits -- some 5,700 in five Western states in the past year -- comes another threat: sprawl. Small towns near energy developments, like Pinedale, Wyo., have seen population surges, which spur spikes in traffic and ugly cookie-cutter sub-developments. Says Pinedale city manager Ward Wise, "U.S. national energy policy is being played out on an epic scale in our backyard."

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Ranchers, greens unite to fight oil and gas wells in West

Ranchers and environmentalists have traditionally gone together like chocolate and, uh, people who really hate chocolate. But of late, they have been overlooking past tussles to fight a common enemy: increasingly ubiquitous oil and gas drilling in the Western U.S. The ranchers say the drilling process often sickens or kills livestock, which are hit by drilling trucks or drink pooled antifreeze or other chemicals from contaminated disposal pits. Greens have been led on guided tours of affected ranches to document contamination. A coalition opposing drilling in New Mexico's San Juan Basin plans to negotiate with drillers to clean up old messes in the area instead of taking the matter to court, an approach favored by area ranchers. "After all the smoke and mirrors go away, ranchers and environmentalists have a common agenda -- and it is protection of the land," said Mark Gordon, a Buffalo, Wyo., rancher.

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